Press release: Put the Consumer First and Focus on What is Important

July 11, 2012 San Diego, California — Today the World Privacy Forum published a comment essay by executive director Pam Dixon urging all privacy stakeholders to focus on the consumer during the Commerce Multistakeholder privacy process, set to get underway tomorrow. “We must put the consumer first and focus on what is important,” said Pam Dixon.

The US Department of Commerce has chosen mobile app privacy as the first topic for which to create consumer privacy principles. “In mobile application privacy, that will mean assigning responsibility for privacy throughout the mobile hierarchy, from mobile wireless carriers to publishers to app portals to developers,” said Dixon.

The World Privacy Forum is interested in a positive dialogue that moves consumer privacy forward. From the essay: “There will be many points of disagreement among stakeholders, but perhaps, just perhaps, we can find this one point of agreement of putting the consumer first, and then moving millimeter by millimeter from there.”

The essay is available at http://www.worldprivacyforum.org. The World Privacy Forum will be attending and participating in the July 12 Mulitstakeholder process.

This new World Privacy Forum report reviews privacy law applicable to the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI), and the large medical information and biospecimen database at its center. The HIPAA health privacy rule and its protections for individuals will not apply to PMI research activities. The key privacy concerns raised by the PMI are the lack of applicable law to govern its collection and use of individuals’ health data, the potential waiver of the patient-physician legal privilege that can shield data from disclosure through litigation, and the possibility of law enforcement access to patient records held in the PMI.

To score is human. Ranking individuals by grades and other performance numbers is as old as human society. Consumer scores — numbers given to individuals to describe or predict their characteristics, habits, or predilections — are a modern day numeric shorthand that ranks, separates, sifts, and otherwise categorizes individuals and also predicts their potential future actions. This new report by Pam Dixon and Robert Gellman explores this issue of predictive scores and privacy.